“The Stanford Prison Experiment” is a straightforward dramatization of the 1971 experiment of the same name.

Nothing fancy here — director Kyle Patrick Alvarez and screenwriter Tim Talbott just tell the story and let the material unfold at a natural pace, because they know something that the audience soon figures out: These events are so gripping and so creepy, and ultimately so dispiriting in their implications, that no embellishment was necessary.